I Am Death

Eighty-nine

The FBI file that Adrian Kennedy had sent Hunter contained Squirm’s complete deposition, together with a single photograph of the then eighteen-year-old boy. He looked a lot thinner, and his head wasn’t completely shaved like Detective Sanders’ was, but the facial features were still the same, especially those piercing pale-blue eyes. Hunter had recognized him as soon as he had seen the picture.

Hunter coughed again, sending another ripple of searing pain through his brain.

‘Squirm.’ He repeated what Sanders had told him. ‘That’s the name your captor used to call you, right? I read that on your file. You used to call him “The Monster”.’

Upon hearing those words again, Sanders took a step back.

Hunter noticed it.

‘You read the FBI file?’ Sanders asked, surprised. ‘How? I was part of the FBI Victim Relocation Program. That program is as secretive as the Witness Protection Program. Not even FBI agents have access to it, with the exception of a few top guns. That’s how I was able to join the LAPD.’ He lifted both palms up. ‘The program assigned me a completely new identity, with a full, totally legit background history that would stand scrutiny from anybody, anywhere. Banks, insurance companies, private investigators, government agencies, you name it — and that includes the LAPD.’

‘Being a cop was the perfect cover,’ Hunter said.

Sanders glared at him, half amused.

‘Oh, no, no, no, no. Don’t disappoint me, Robert. You were doing great with the figuring-out thing. You think I joined the LAPD so I could start killing people?’

Hunter tiptoed again. This time a little to the right.

‘I joined the LAPD because I genuinely wanted to help people.’ Sanders’ voice became a little harsher. ‘I wanted to become a Missing Persons investigator so I could try to help people like me. So I could arrest people like ‘The Monster’. You, more than anyone, know that he wasn’t unique. The world is full of monsters like him.’ He paused and locked eyes with Hunter again. ‘Monsters like me.’

Hunter drew a deep breath and the air hurt his lungs.

‘Do you want to know what changed me?’

Hunter already knew.

‘Your file,’ he said.

Sanders snapped his thumb and forefinger together, then pointed at Hunter with a Eureka gesture. ‘Exactly, Robert. My file. Being a cop, especially being the head of an LAPD department, gives you access to certain restricted files. Files that, as a civilian, I would never normally have seen. Files on the investigation of certain murders, certain disappearances. They didn’t know it then but they all had one common denominator. Would you like to guess what that common denominator was, Robert?’

‘“The Monster”.’

‘“The Monster”,’ Sanders agreed. ‘And what I found out from those files changed me for ever. Do you know what that was?’

Hunter’s eyes blinked a silent ‘no’.

‘Seven times, Robert.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘In the six years I was kept locked in that disgusting cell, between the LAPD and the FBI “The Monster” was questioned by the authorities seven times. SEVEN TIMES.’ Sanders yelled those two last words at Hunter’s face, spit flying from his mouth.

Hunter flinched but it was too late. Some of the spit got into his mouth.

Sanders was breathing heavily now. Words were coming from between clenched teeth. ‘I was just a boy when I was taken, Robert. I was eleven years old. I was intelligent. I had a future. And for six years, that boy was sodomized and beaten up every day, as if I were nothing more than just a piece of rotten meat.’

Sanders took a step back, grabbed hold of his shirt with both hands and ripped it off his body. Buttons were propelled high up in the air before bouncing down against the concrete floor.

Despite the pain and how fatigued he was, Hunter’s eyes widened. Sanders’ torso was completely covered in scars — some small, some big, some enormous. Many of them hadn’t healed well and the scars looked leathery and lumpy. Some looked like huge welts.

Sanders turned around. His back looked even worse.

Hunter remained silent.

‘During those six years, they had seven chances to end it all. SEVEN.’ Sanders began pacing the room in front of Hunter. Tears looked like they were about to well up in his eyes but they never materialized. Squirm was still keeping true to his promise. His voice became deep, full of gravel. ‘Seven times, Robert. The LAPD and the FBI looked straight into the eyes of pure evil seven different times. The eyes of a complete maniac, and yet they didn’t see the monster inside him.’ He stopped pacing. ‘They were supposed to be the best at what they did. The experts.’

A paragraph of Sanders’ first note to Mayor Bailey popped into Hunter’s head.

Sanders began pacing again.

‘They could’ve saved me from my nightmare, Robert. They could’ve saved me from becoming what I have become. They could’ve saved all those women. They could’ve saved all of these women.’

Hunter knew he was referring to his own victims.

‘In those six years, he killed thirty-three women. And he made me watch them all die. He made me memorize all of their names.’

Hunter remembered the file he had read just hours earlier. Once ‘The Monster’ had been arrested, after Squirm finally directed the police to his hiding place, he had confessed to over sixty murders. He’d been killing women for more than ten years.

‘So finding out that you could’ve been saved changed you,’ Hunter said.

‘Wouldn’t it have changed you?’ Sanders shot back. ‘How could the best of the best make so many mistakes that cost so many so much?’

Hunter didn’t reply.

‘Those women are dead, Robert. They’re not coming back. My life was ripped from me.’ Sanders smiled a humorless smile. ‘Mistakes have a flip side to them, Robert — repercussions. You know that. The bigger the mistake, the more devastating the repercussions. I am the repercussion of the mistakes that were made twenty-five years ago.’ Sanders opened his arms as if he were welcoming a gift from the skies. ‘And here I am. I knew that if a similar case happened today, those same mistakes would repeat themselves because people only see what they want to see. You only see what you want to see.’

Hunter’s toes were becoming exhausted and the chain around his wrists was starting to dig deep into his flesh again, shutting down the blood flow to his hands.

‘So, to prove a point, you became “The Monster” yourself,’ Hunter said. ‘You retraced his steps and you began killing women. Women with the exact same name as the ones he killed. In the exact same order. Using the exact same methods. Even the filming.’

Sanders’ intrigued stare returned. He had no idea Hunter knew about the filming.

‘You’re not a trophy collector. The films mean nothing to you. You did it because “The Monster” did it. You even found a place hidden away and transformed it to look similar to the place in which he kept you.’

‘With a few modern modifications, of course,’ Sanders admitted. ‘How do you think I knew that you were approaching the house at this time in the morning?’ His eyebrows arched. ‘There are hidden sensors all around this place.’

Those words filled Hunter with dread.

‘Why do you think that the front door was unlocked, Robert? I was waiting for you. I wanted you to get inside.’

Hunter’s arms were starting to feel like meat lumps.

‘But I’m impressed, Robert,’ Sanders continued. ‘You are right. I became “The Monster” to prove a point. My point. But I didn’t just take to the streets and start killing people. I began devising my plan years ago. I didn’t want to rush it. And I planned everything to the very last detail. The first victim had to be the result of an over-the-top, daring abduction. That way, I could guarantee that the Missing Persons Unit’s Special Division would get the call. I would get the call.’ He chuckled at his own cleverness. ‘I even managed to find the person who, if the detective assigned to the murders investigation didn’t make a complete fuck-up of everything, would become the perfect scapegoat. The perfect prime suspect.’

‘Mat Hade,’ Hunter said. ‘I Am Death.’

The surprise in Sanders’ eyes was sincere.

‘Wow! You figured that one out too?’ He nodded approvingly. ‘OK, now I’m really impressed. I knew you were good from the first time we met in my office to discuss Nicole’s case. You were asking all the right questions, but I must admit that I wasn’t expecting you to ask for a history search on similar abductions. I thought that you would just grab the files and leave. But your request gave me the perfect opportunity to bring Mat into the equation and to run my first quick test on how good you really were.’

‘You called me and told me you hadn’t found anything,’ Hunter said.

‘Exactly. And that was when you figured out what we were doing wrong. We were searching only for concluded cases. That really impressed me, Robert. Obviously, I already had it all covered from the beginning. The idea was to suggest that search to the detective in charge of Nicole’s murder investigation myself, but you saved me the trouble. And if you hadn’t brought the “concluded case” mistake to my attention, I would’ve just said that I thought better of the search you had asked me for and had come up with that idea myself.’

Hunter’s mouth was starting to feel bone dry.

‘I knew I needed a scapegoat and it took me years to find him, but Mathew Hade fitted my plans like a glove,’ Sanders said. ‘But not even the best-laid plans could’ve delivered his name. That was pure luck. How perfect was it? Can you imagine how surprised I was when I figured out that I could make the perfect anagram out of it?’

Sanders laughed another throaty, macabre laugh before continuing. ‘That also gave me the perfect opportunity to drop the best hint into my note.’

‘“The clues are in the name”,’ Hunter said.

‘Wasn’t it perfect?’ Sanders boasted. ‘A clue with a double meaning: I MAT HADE or I AM DEATH. But in the end, that wasn’t the name, or names, the clue was referring to. That was genius, if I might say so myself.’

‘So once you knew you would hand us Mat Hade’s file,’ Hunter said. ‘You took care of him.’

Sanders applauded Hunter again. ‘Of course I did. I didn’t want you finding him. That would’ve spoiled all my plans.’

‘And you planted those items in his apartment — the red pen, the sheets of paper, the book of matches.’

‘Another genius move, don’t you think?’ Sanders replied. ‘This whole case was supposed to have stretched for a very long time, Robert, and with every new victim I gave you, a new cryptic clue would’ve once again pointed to one person, and one person only — Mat Hade. How frustrating do you think it would be for you to chase a ghost, Robert?’

Silence reigned for several seconds before Sanders spoke again.

‘But though you were good, Robert, very good indeed, you weren’t good enough. Because you made the same deadly mistake that was made twenty-five years ago. You know what that mistake was, don’t you?’

‘I looked into your eyes and I didn’t see it.’

‘Correct again. You and your partner looked straight into my eyes. I sat in your office. You sat in mine. We conversed and you still didn’t know. Admit it.’

Before Hunter could say anything, an electronic beeping sounded in the room.

Hunter’s eyes scanned the place.

‘They’re here,’ Sanders said, grabbing the double-barreled shotgun he had left on the workshop table that was half hidden in the shadows.

Hunter looked at him with deep concern.

‘I knew that you wouldn’t turn up here by yourself, Robert. You’re not that dumb. Sure, you might turn up here first to check things out, but the cavalry would be right behind you, correct?’

Hunter breathed out.

Sanders smiled. ‘I know I’ve got no way out of here. But I don’t need a way out. I don’t want a way out. My life ended when I was eleven, and whatever hell I go to from here, it will feel like paradise compared to the last twenty-five years of my life.’

He cocked the hammer on both barrels.

‘One for you, one for me. Congratulations, Robert. You managed to stop the murders. And, believe me, I would’ve carried on until someone corrected the mistakes that were made twenty-five years ago. But you still failed me. You failed to identify the monster in me when you looked into my eyes.’

The beeping got louder and more frantic.

‘They are inside,’ Sanders announced with a smile, pointing the shotgun at Hunter.

Hunter looked straight into Sanders’ eyes. He would not give him the satisfaction of closing his eyes or looking away.

The door at the top of the staircase creaked.

Sanders squeezed the trigger.